TIPS Forum 2008: South Africa’s Economic Miracle – Has the Emperor Lost His Clothes? (36)

The systematic failure of post-settlement support in South African land reform has been identified as a major contributing variable to the approximated 50 percent failure rate of new land reform projects. In spite of this dismal record, government increasingly finds itself under immense political pressure to speed up land reform…

OrganisationVienna University of Economics and Business Administration

Publication Author(s)Michael Wild, Oliver Schwank

Countries and RegionsSouth Africa

South Africa has a peculiar industrial structure given its factor endowments: production is capital intensive in sectors and concentrated in capital intensive sectors despite an abundance of unskilled labour. Part of the reason for this phenomenon lies in the development process of South African industry: it grew around the mining…

The drive towards SADC trade liberalisation is a goal that is emphasised in most documents of the SADC Secretariat, including the protocol on trade and the regional indicative strategic development plan (RISDP). This trade liberalisation aims to deepen regional integration through increased intra-trade between SADC member states, which was to…

OrganisationFaculty of economic and management sciences, University of the Western Cape

Publication Author(s)Douglas Blackmur

Countries and RegionsSouth Africa

The trend towards the Regulatory State. It has been argued that: 'A fundamental driver of the demand for regulation in recent years has been increasing 'risk aversion' in many spheres of life. Regulation has come to be seen as a panacea for many of society's ills and as a means…

South Africa is in its infancy regarding independent economic regulation of network utilities. Although economic regulation of public utilities have been exercised in South Africa for a number of years (usually by the line Government Department), the establishment of independent economic regulation had only emerged a little more than ten…

Countries and RegionsAsia, European Union (EU), Mercosur (Common Market of the South)

This paper examines the volatility spillovers between the South African currency and the currencies of selected markets in developed and emerging Europe as well as Asia and Latin America. Additionally, the exchange rate volatility spillovers are examined over one year window samples to determine the evolution of volatility spillovers between…

OrganisationSchool of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Publication Author(s)Glen Robbins

Countries and RegionsSouth Africa

The South Africa that emerged from the 1994 democratic elections was one characterised by widespread poverty and inequality with an economy that was suffering the effects of macro-economic mismanagement. The root causes of these problems were seen to have originated from within the distorted policies of a highly centralised apartheid…

The South African government has begun to speed up the delivery of infrastructure. This policy shift is in line with its aim to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014, achievable if the economy grows at an average rate of 6 per cent by 2010. The government was able to demonstrate…

The making of a 'new' South Africa has not been without its challenges. After the political miracle of 1994, political actors, policy-makers and academics had to transform repressive and apartheid predatory political machinery into a functional and inclusive and democratised polity. Inebriated by the euphoria of a newly found democracy,…

OrganisationVienna University of Economics and Business Administration

Publication Author(s)Oliver Schwank;Michael Wild

Countries and RegionsSouth Africa

South Africa has a peculiar industrial structure given its factor endowments: production is capital intensive in sectors and concentrated in capital intensive sectors despite an abundance of unskilled labour. Part of the reason for this phenomenon lies in the development process of South African industry: it grew around the mining…

Industrial Development Zones (IDZs) have been and still are important vehicles used by developing countries to facilitate investments, create jobs and boost exports. The attractiveness of IDZs is characterized primarily by their association with the adjacent location of an airport or port, good basic infrastructure and duty-free imports of production-related…

The future direction of South African industrial policy is the subject of vigorous and healthy debate. The outcome is important for the country's economic development. This study is an attempt to contribute to these discussions through an overview of and some questions about the economic impacts of South Africa's post…

This document has the objective to determine and to analyze the economic vocation of the ten main cities in Mexico, it with the purpose to identify areas of opportunity for the implementation of policies of industrial clusters as a measure to increase the productivity in the country. From the decade…

South Africa's energy system has been, and still is, one of the key contributing factors to the social and economic development of the nation. By international standards, the South African economy is very energy-intensive, meaning that the country uses a large amount of energy for every rand of economic output.…

The world's interest in forced displacement, including refugees and forced migrants has increased considerably during the last decades as the number of people displaced became a global concern. At the end of 2005, the global figure of "persons of concern" to the United Nations Higher Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) stood…

The paper will explore the assumptions and analysis informing the drafting of a second economy strategy, a process that has been underway under the auspices of The Second Economy Strategy Project: an initiative of the Presidency, based at TIPS. The paper will argue that the concept of 'the second economy'…

Democracy opened the door for transformation in South Africa. In the past decade, various laws, policies and programmes have been implemented with the aim of putting into effect the principles of the new South African Constitution and the Bill of Rights, with the aim of improving the lives of the…

Colonialism and the deleterious impact of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and now globalisation. Some parts of postcolonial Africa have attempted to set up ministries of economic development. Others have concentrated on attracting on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) whilst some others have early on realised that the state and private capital…

There are fundamental links between academic treatments of 'economic development' and of the popular policy discourse of 'competitiveness'. Productivity-focused analyses of competitiveness are inherently related to market-centric analyses of development that have economic growth as their objective. However, a consensus is emerging on the need for broader conceptions of economic…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a relationship between export volumes and exchange rate volatility exists as suggested in the ASGISA document. It goes about this by first investigating the theoretical channels that predict the relationship between export volumes and exchange rate volatility. The theoretical prediction though,…

In this paper we analyze the relationships between exchange rates, inflation and competitiveness. We show that over the 1994-2006 sample period real exchange rate depreciations did not improve the trade balance and therefore had no positive effect on growth. One reason is that SA exports are priced to market (PTM…

Formal inflation targeting has been adopted as the monetary policy framework in South Africa since February 2000. Prior to that (since about 1990), the South African Reserve Bank has pursued implicit inflation targeting with no officially announced inflation target. Official inflation targeting frameworks are based on the premise that inflation…

To better understand why some currencies are more volatile than others, this paper considers the cross-country determinants of exchange rate volatility for a set of middle-income countries. Overall, the paper finds that higher levels of reserves reduce volatility, and it is estimated that an appropriate level of reserves is approximately…

The key objective of this paper is to construct a commodity export price series for South Africa (incorporating a wider range of commodities than those considered in the empirical literature on South Africa to date) and to determine its influence on real exchange rate movements in South Africa. Existing models…

The ASGISA document identifies several binding constraints preventing South Africa from achieving elevated levels of economic growth (Republic of South Africa, 2006). This paper takes an evolutionary perspective to consider whether the proposed policy interventions will address what is, arguably, a fundamental growth constraint: the current inability of the economic…

The adverse micro- and macroeconomic impacts of the HIV and AIDS epidemic is relatively well documented. With the advent of the free provision of antiretroviral treatment (ART) in the public sector, the focus in research on the economics of HIV and AIDS has shifted toward determining how ART may ameliorate…

One of the most pervasive trends in contemporary South African business is the substitution of alternative work forms for full-time, permanent employment. Part-time work and external contracting are used extensively by firms, ostensibly to adjust to altering work conditions. However, relatively little is understood about the process, context and contingencies…

Trade-in-services is fast becoming one of the foremost areas of research and policy making in the international trade arena. Although the General Agreement on Trade-in-Services (GATS) was implemented in 1995, it is only recently, with the realisation of the close linkages between goods and service exports and the advent of…

OrganisationSenior Research Manager, Centre for Employment, Poverty and Growth, HSRC.

Publication Author(s)Tim Hart

Countries and RegionsSouth Africa

This paper will review the attempts at fostering resource poor small-scale agricultural development in South Africa from 1994 to the present. Based on the lack of a concerted policy for support and development of this group of farmers and given the incomplete datasets about this group a number an attempt…